“a learning disability is a discrepancy between ability and achievement”

“school should be about making things easier, nor harder.”

“the irony of not being able to remember a mnemonic device”

“maybe it’s so popular that all the copies have been stolen, that’s my dream”

i really wanted to like this one. i mean, i love his other work, and he made a suggested ’90s r&b mixtape musical accompaniment to his reading, hello-i couldn’t be more of the target demographic for that. but alas and alack, i couldn’t get into it, it had a soul city vibe translated through better writing in a less try-hardy way, and i read it because i didn’t have anything else the day that i spent at the north york public library for the annual tutor conference for volunteers. the above quotes came from the wonder-full lectures that were expertly curated once again. i only read until p.129, but i may one day have an epiphany about it in a greyhound bus station after midnight like black on both sides. there’s a lot of zadie smith hateration going about, so i can’t wait to read that one and see where i fit on the spectrum.

“…when two faced it was akin to a pair of young pups nuzzling snout to snout, awaiting the instinct to maul or mate.” (16)

“Betty suggested a girlfriend might help, instead Olpert took to keeping moles: half his small room was taken up with a terrarium in which they burrowed and lived their delicate, private lives.” (54)

“His accent could be described only as foreign, something bad actors might adopt to suggest /somewhere else/, all rolling r’s and hacking k’s, but even then nothing was consistent-a sentence later the vowels might drawl and twang.” (83)

(sigh), the apostrophe s.

“She had the defeated look of a child promised a pony and whose parents instead have divorced.” (113)

it is also ironic to note my complete inability to read the darwin awards, it being the first library book i’ve lost in a long time (on the same day that i lost my voice), but bigups to the person on the 504 streetcar that returned it to the library to me not even an hour afterwards. thank you.